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Thursday, September 23, 2004

On biscuits, cookies and other baked goods

This morning for breakfast I enjoyed a tin of Pillsbury Golden Homestyle Butter Tastin' Biscuits.
"Butter tastin'" -- it just has that great sense of an Americana foodstuff, doesn't it? It's not real butter, it's just butter tastin'. No actual butter was harmed in the making of my biscuits.
When I say biscuits, I realize that those of you not living in the God-Blessed United States of America (we have to write it that way now -- it's a new Homeland Security rule) may be thinking of one of these -- a cookie. What confuses me is that in the UK, a cookie is called a biscuit, but a biscuit is not called a cookie. It's been a while since I lived there, and I have a notoriously crap memory, but I think a biscuit is called a muffin. But if that's the case, what do you call a muffin? A cupcake? It seems to me that we are stuck on an endless cycle of renaming baked goods until eventually one of us holds something aloft and says, "What's this?" and the other is forced to just stare blankly and make something up, like "foolabaloo."
Bill Clinton is to blame for this. And Noah Webster. Darn him all to heck. I don't want to eat any foolabaloos.

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Who's writing this?

Hola. I'm Chris Cope, author of the books The Way Forward and Cwrw am Ddim. I'm originally from Austin, Texas, but through a series of terrible and wonderful events called "life," I now reside in Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland -- specifically the bit that is Penarth, Wales. Occasionally I write things.